Amid last year’s destruction, Haiti braces for another hurricane season

A woman and her children take sit in ‘Hanna Praville’, a camp located near the city of Gonaives, Haiti, for people displaced by successive tropical storms and hurricanes in 2008.

GONAÏVES, Haiti, 16 March 2009 – As Haiti braces for another hurricane season, UNICEF Representative in Haiti Annamaria Laurini recently surveyed Gonaïves, the country’s third largest city, to evaluate its emergency preparedness. She was accompanied on the visit by UNICEF Emergency Operations Chief Lucia Elmi.

Gonaïves’s population of 300,000 had not yet fully recovered from the destruction of 2004’s Hurricane Jeanne when the city was hit by a series of devastating storms last year. Despite the recovery efforts of UNICEF and its partners – a third of the city has been repaired – grave concerns remain about the possibility of another catastrophic hurricane season in 2009.

Survey of storm damage

Driving on a dirt road detour to reach Gonaïves, Ms. Laurini pointed out the lake that flooded Gonaives in 2008. “It flooded the entire region, cut off the road, destroyed the bridge. There was no access to Gonaïves for two months.”

A tour of the town’s main street revealed even more damage. Dried walls of mud seemed to engulf the battered buildings and vehicles, while the few government-provided tractors kept working around the clock to clear mounds of debris lining the streets.

Some significant improvements have been made, such as the effort to clear the flood evacuation gate in the town’s central canal. But even this victory is precarious, as recent downpours – unusual for this time of year – have led to above-normal water levels, raising the risk of flooding once the April rainy season starts.

An aerial view shows flood damage in the port city of Gonaives in the aftermath of the successive storms that struck Haiti during the 2008 hurricane season.

Concentrating limited resources

At an informal meeting of UNICEF and its partners in Gonaïves, several key priorities were laid out – including the need for another site to dispose of the remaining tonnes of dried mud that accumulated after the 2008 storms. Areas of progress were also noted, such as the successful rehabilitation of roughly half of the community’s wells and the installation of drinking-water kiosks.

“Our aim is to transfer the know-how and tools for a high-quality, durable pump system to the community, so that it can effectively take it over and operate it on a permanent level as its own,” said Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Specialist Julien Atchade Kossi, who, along with Jean-Marie Duval from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, has been in Gonaïves since the onset of last year’s devastating hurricane season.

But participants agreed that many huge tasks still lay ahead. They expressed concern that critical emergency equipment and support would be more difficult to procure this year due to the current global economic crisis.

“We don’t have the luxury to spread our resources to a multitude of areas,” said Ms. Laurini. “We must concentrate on the one or two priorities we face right now, and emergency preparedness is unquestionably our biggest concern. And there, too, we don’t have sufficient funding at this late stage to meet the task before us.”

About UNICEF UNICEF is on the ground in over 150 countries and territories to help children survive and thrive, from early childhood through adolescence. The world’s largest provider of vaccines for developing countries, UNICEF supports child health and nutrition, good water and sanitation, quality basic education for all boys and girls, and the protection of children from violence, exploitation, and AIDS. UNICEF is funded entirely by the voluntary contributions of individuals, businesses, foundations and governments.